AVEENO Last-Drop Conversion To Deal With Hopeless Pump System - USE TPU

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS DESIGNED FOR PRINTING IN TPU so that it can be thumped on its head without breaking it. The cap is a good snug fit on the delivery tip, I haven't tried it in PLA. I used 0.4mm nozzle, 0.4mm line width, 0.2mm layers, no adhesion needed, no supports.

Here is a picture of the problem…

Even with being smacked on the worktop, that's about as much as we can get out of it using the pump.

Bad design really annoys me! And this is baaaaaaad design. The pump itself is fine. The skin cream itself is superb. But putting the two together was, let's just say, not done with the consumer in mind :o)

The problem is it's a thick cream - think fully whipped dairy double cream for consistency. It doesn't slump at all. Which means that soon after you start using it, the pump sucks a channel of air through the cream, and the pump stops pumping cream. Yes you can thump it down on the worktop but even that doesn't always work when you're down to the last quarter of the bottle, and at the thick end of ten pounds to buy, that's a lot of waste. Yes you can alternatively hack the bottle in half and scrape out all the remaining contents and put it in a jar with a lid - until now I've done that with Gu dessert pots and a 3D printed lid, and usually the pot is pretty much filled with the remains from one pump dispenser that's given up.

So I thought up an alternative. Frankly a cream this thick should come in a tub in the first place so you can scoop it out with a finger, but no doubt some would say that risks contamination of the product, to which I would argue that if you're putting skin cream on with dirty hands, you have other issues to worry about than whether your skin cream is minging!

I could have designed a complete new cap, but that's fiddly getting the right thread drawn in CAD especially as I'm still learning that stuff. Fortunately the pump is quite easy to dismantle and adjust, so I did that.

Take the pump out of the bottle, pull the tube and pump head off and bin them. Knock the white mechanism out from the top through the bottom of the green collar, and throw the collar away. Wash the remaining mechanism, chuck away the little valve ball in the centre pipe, and then prune away the sticky-out bits until you've got it looking like the following pic on the underside…

…and like the following pic on the top…

So now you've got the threaded guts of the cap on the left as shown below. In the middle is the lower insert which fills the neck of the bottle to minimise waste as well as blocking off the two little air vents, this should be glued in place on the underside. On the right is the new cap which doubles as a stand for leaving the bottle upside down so that if there is any slumping of the product it will gather in the top of the bottle. As it's TPU, you can tap the bottle on its cap to encourage it to get to the top. I know you can tap the bottle right way up to help the original pump but then the pump is already full of air and takes many pumpings to prime it again, while tapping the lid with this modification means the cream is right there ready to come out when you take off the cap.

Below is the underside insert glued in place, with the cap ready to fit.

Below is the whole assembly, ready to screw back onto the bottle…

And finally here it is on the bottle. This particular one is the “Daily Moisturising Creamy Oil” but they use the same pump for the “Daily Moisturising Body Lotion” so the same mod works for both. You only need to do this mod once, then wash it and put it on the next bottle.

Hope this saves someone from the criminal waste of chucking out good product!

UPDATE April2025 - added STL with slightly broader cap for a bit more stability when standing upside down.

Please Like this model if you find it useful.

If you REALLY like it, https://www.buymeacoffee.com/gigabeast :o)